Yep, It is quite old & according to some old bug report, it does not compile (well) with the new xlib.Thierry Godefroy (Xdialog maintainer) badmouth Debian that it is rigid packaging policy and not a software fault (BTW I like Debian for its packaging). It is too bad, but there is nothing that replaces Xdialog (dialog & whiptail are terminal and not the X programs). I'll try to compile Xdialog & see what happen.

Zenity is a subset (more or less) of Xdialog. Probably 1/3 to ½ of Xdialog code is implemented into zenity. Widgets such; “2inputsbox” where you can input username & password in one box, “buildlist” where you can build file list and many other boxes are implemented in Xdialog, but not in zenity. Also more options are available for existing widgets in Xdialog. In my case I miss tailbox in zenity where you can monitor progress in more details. There is always philosophical question; can you use GTK or even xlib? No, Xdialog is an almost complete GUI interface with same eas to bind to scrip as zenity (just more options).

It is a few years than I was not using debian and I am very badly surprized to constat than Xdialog is not in squeeze. I think this is a shame because it work and many peoples can have, like me, shell scripts that depend on it. I am not a programmer, but I can make shell scripts, and Xdialog is a very simple and efficent way to make interactive shell scripts for X.

I have no time to arge on it, and no interest beside those raisons, but I think that it would be a good move to make a squeeze gtk2 build of Xdialog.

I have no problem to install it on opensuze (a search and a few clicks) and gentoo (emerge xdialog). I just installed it in squeeze, and it seam to work very well. To get it to work with gtk2, it is just to configure it with "--enable-gtk2" and all is going fine afterwards.